Over the course of a career spanning the later nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, Matilda Betham-Edwards maintained a phenomenally high publishing output and covered most viable genres. She was best known for her novels and her travel-books about France, but she also wrote poetry and children's books, and edited and introduced the works of others. As a travel writer she is unusually sensitive to the conditions of peasant life on the land; as a novelist she draws heavily on actual experience, whether lived or observed.

Milestones

4 March 1836 Matilda Barbara Edwards (later MBE) was born at Westerfield Hall, near Ipswich, Suffolk, the fourth daughter among six brothers and sisters.

1857 MBE published The White House by the Sea, A Love Story, "in two handsome volumes," as she later put it herself.

By 6 March 1869 MBE published her romantic novel Kitty, which Helen C. Black ranked as her most popular.